Just last year, New York City signed a $982,269 contract with Swintec for the purchase of thousands of new manual and electric typewriters over the next three years -- some of which retail for as much as $649 apiece. And last month, the city signed a $99,570 deal with Afax Business Machines for the maintenance of its existing typewriters.

The department is working on software to eliminate the old machines, a rep said.

Yes, best to write your own word processor than choose from among the several quite popular models available. In the meantime, please use the most archaic technology available to complete the task, thanks.

I've seen those PCs with a 17" flat panel running Windows and whatever 3270 emulator. They're probably $500 apiece - I bet finding and maintaining an original 3270 would be more expensive, consume more power and have a worse keyboard.

Legacy systems have their place in the world for sure. And the quality of a tested and hardened enterprise system can not be underrated. However. At some point it is hard to find hardware to run the env, hard to find programmers and such and most of all it is hard to do silly modern things with.

That said the person who walks in the door and offers you COTS Java web portal should be shot and then shot again to be sure.

Until last year, our city clerk used an electric typewriter to fill out car registration forms. Apparently it took until 2009 for them to figure out that word processor plus laser printer equaled good times.

It appears the $982k contract isn't for "thump key, metal strikes paper" typewriters the writer would like us to visualise, but for essentially 1980s-style word processors, single purpose computers with built-in printing that are good for automatically filling out paper forms. The mechanical typewriters aren't in the final contract except for its title.

Still obsolete, but only by a decade or two, and probably not a lot slower than using a PC (and that's assuming every New York detective is computer literate which may be a lot to ask). The biggest loss here is that this data is on paper at all, which means it's not easy to do anything useful with it in bulk. Long term they need tailored software that meets New York's specific requirements for documenting police work, and it sounds like they've been slowly working on that.

Hey NYC! Psssst... I've got some nice Displaywriters or maybe some Wangs. Wait, you want some Brother daisywheel printers or how 'bout some primo NEC Spinwriters? Whatever you want, NYC, I can make you the best deal. You just stick with me.

Of the roughly 500 NYPD officers Linn interviewed for a study on arrest behavior, many mentioned the outdated equipment as part of their reason for being averse to making arrests for less serious crimes.

I was reading recently a NYPD officer's account of how long it takes to process an arrest. It's not uncommon to be sitting with one person for the better part of six or seven hours. That's six or seven times as long as is reasonable.

In many not implausible disaster scenarios, the civic authority having a cache of manual and electric typewriters is a complete win. Meanwhile, any use value they can get from that cache is just icing on the cake. The only stupid part is that bs about "software to eliminate." I'll be impressed when someone shows me such software.

My first printer was a Swintec combination typewriter and printer that used a daisywheel and had a parallel port. My dad paid $600 for it and for some reason didn't use it for his business, so he gave it to me. Quite honestly, it was a ripoff. It was really slow and REALLY LOUD, even for 1988.